I wish I could proudly claim to be an Agnostic but I'm not there yet. I was raised Southern Baptist and it would break my mom's heart to think I was not going to join her in heaven. She is 80 and suffers from depression so I'm not going to add to her laundry list of things to be sad about. Also, I work for a very religious organization. If I came out as Agnostic I truly believe my future career would suffer. Yes, I'm considering a change of employers but that's a different discussion.

I recently discovered TTA podcast and totally enjoy it. I started investigating the evolution theory to try and understand how it disproves creationism. Geesh! No wonder people decide to believe creationism. Evolution is science that requires some effort to think and understand! It's much simpler to just go with God said it , I believe it! GAG!

So that's the first item on my list - to learn about evolution. I'm sure there are lot's of resources to be found on this site. I'm looking forward to the journey. In the meantime I'm still holding on to my mustard seed size faith "just in case"

(24-02-2017 08:28 PM)mustardseed Wrote: I wish I could proudly claim to be an Agnostic but I'm not there yet. I was raised Southern Baptist and it would break my mom's heart to think I was not going to join her in heaven. She is 80 and suffers from depression so I'm not going to add to her laundry list of things to be sad about. Also, I work for a very religious organization. If I came out as Agnostic I truly believe my future career would suffer. Yes, I'm considering a change of employers but that's a different discussion.

I recently discovered TTA podcast and totally enjoy it. I started investigating the evolution theory to try and understand how it disproves creationism. Geesh! No wonder people decide to believe creationism. Evolution is science that requires some effort to think and understand! It's much simpler to just go with God said it , I believe it! GAG!

So that's the first item on my list - to learn about evolution. I'm sure there are lot's of resources to be found on this site. I'm looking forward to the journey. In the meantime I'm still holding on to my mustard seed size faith "just in case"

Welcome to TTA.
There's no hurry to tell anyone about your change in thinking until you're ready.
Give yourself time to adjust.

Yeah, welcome. No rush. If you like your belief, go with that. I hope you'll consider hanging on to your agnosticism too. I've never understood why every one is not an agnostic. No one knows anything with certainty, some just have less tolerance for insecurity than others. And you should be able to hold on to all of science -evolution included - too. You don't need to know exactly what god is or can do (and no one does) in order to believe in him/her/it. So no science is ruled out in order to believe - unless you want to go with literal bible-ism.

I'll second what others have said here. It is your journey and you decide the time and place when / if you want to come out. My Grandfather is 96 and is a devout Christian. I respect him more than any person I've ever known (family aside). He is a honorable man, served in WWII for 4 years, was married to my Grandmother for 54 years and I think it would break his heart if he knew that I was an atheist. Now everyone else in my family knows I am but I have shielded him from that information as I don't want it to be on his mind during his final years.

My personal journey was easy for me since I stopped believing when I was 14 and never looked back. Read as much as you can. Study the bible and I think you will find that the biblical account of the way things happened just isn't true. That's not a big leap to make. Enjoy the journey to free thought and when / if you decide that you are actually an atheist there is no shame in that. It just means that you are open minded enough to actually search for the truth rather than have someone tell you this is how it happened and if you don't believe... well you know the story.

Don't sweat the agnostic/atheist/unbeliever/heathen/heretic/infidel labels. They aren't worth bugger all when you get right down to it. Anbody with a worldview more sophisticated than a cabbage plant is going to need more than a single word to define the. Self-identify however you want.

Coming out to your aged grandmother isn't going to do much good. As you've suggested, she's too set in her ways and it would only upset her. I've never been able to figure out how it could be eternal paradise if some of your loved ones are conspicuously absent but being ridiculous never stoppped people believing in anything.

Ditto on coming out to your boss. It's a shame that it's a part of your workplace. Good luck finding a job with less religiosity.

Evolution can be tricky to wrap your head around at first but once you get there it's pretty damned amazing. The biggest challenges are viewing it in deep time without those pesky pigeonholes we lovingly know as species. Very handy for classification in the here and now but counterproductive when trying to understand their inter-relations over multi-million years timescales.

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Flesh and blood of a dead star, slain in the apocalypse of supernova, resurrected by four billion years of continuous autocatalytic reaction and crowned with the emergent property of sentience in the dream that the universe might one day understand itself.